It wasn’t a place I was expecting to see skiers. For starters, there wasn’t any snow. It was summer. And I was on the industrial waterfront in one of the world’s flattest regions. But perhaps strangest of all was the fact that they were skiing down the side of a power plant — a power plant that might offer a new model for urban design thinking.
Opened in 2017 and designed by BIG and SLA, the Copenhill power plant in Copenhagen uses household waste collected from surrounding municipalities to generate district heating and electricity. The advanced emissions reduction technology used in its incineration process contributes towards the Danish capital’s goal of becoming the first carbon-neutral city by 2025.